Evan Gough, Author at Universe Today

April 8, 2024April 8, 2024 by Evan Gough

Measuring the Atmospheres of Other Worlds to See if There are Enough Nutrients for Life

A NASA graphic explaining how a telescope can measure an exoplanet atmosphere using spectroscopy. Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lizbeth B. De La Torre.

Life on Earth depends on six critical elements: Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous, and Sulfur. These elements are referred to as CHNOPS, and along with several trace micronutrients and liquid water, they’re what life needs.

Scientists are getting a handle on detecting exoplanets that might be warm enough to have liquid water on their surfaces, habitability’s most basic signal. But now, they’re looking to up their game by finding CHNOPS in exoplanet atmospheres.

April 8, 2024April 8, 2024 by Evan Gough

Does the Rise of AI Explain the Great Silence in the Universe?

Will AI become indispensable in an age of "big data" astronomy? Credit: DALL-E

Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

April 6, 2024April 6, 2024 by Evan Gough

Roman Will Learn the Ages of Hundreds of Thousands of Stars

By carefully observing star spots, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will determine stellar ages. It needs some help from AI though. Image Credit: NASA and STScI

Astronomers routinely provide the ages of the stars they study. But the methods of measuring ages aren’t 100% accurate. Measuring the ages of distant stars is a difficult task.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope should make some progress.

April 5, 2024April 5, 2024 by Evan Gough

The Stellar Demolition Derby in the Centre of the Galaxy

This illustration shows stars orbiting close to the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole. The black hole accelerates stars nearby and sends them crashing into one another. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/Spaceengine.org

The region near the Milky Way’s centre is dominated by the supermassive black hole that resides there. Sagittarius A*’s overwhelming gravity creates a chaotic region where tightly packed, high-speed stars crash into one another like cars in a demolition derby.

These collisions and glancing blows change the stars forever. Some become strange, stripped-down, low-mass stars, while others gain new life.

April 5, 2024April 5, 2024 by Evan Gough

A New Map Shows the Universe’s Dark Energy May Be Evolving

This image shows a slice of the 3D map of galaxies collected in the first year of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Survey. Earth is at the tip, with the furthest galaxies plotted at distances of 11 billion light-years. Each point represents one galaxy. This version of the DESI map includes 600,000 galaxies — less than 0.1% of the survey's full volume. Image Credit: DESI Collaboration/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor

At the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, an instrument with 5,000 tiny robotic eyes scans the night sky. Every 20 minutes, the instrument and the telescope it’s attached to observe a new set of 5,000 galaxies. The instrument is called DESI—Dark Energy Survey Instrument—and once it’s completed its five-year mission, it’ll create the largest 3D map of the Universe ever created.

But scientists are getting access to DESI’s first data release and it suggests that dark energy may be evolving.

April 4, 2024April 4, 2024 by Evan Gough

A New Tabletop Experiment to Search for Dark Matter

Astronomers are getting a new tool to help them in the hunt for Dark Matter. This is a rendering of the BREAD design, which stands for Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection. The ‘Hershey’s Kiss’-shaped structure funnels potential dark matter signals to the copper-colored detector on the left. The detector is compact enough to fit on a tabletop. Image courtesy BREAD Collaboration

What is Dark Matter? We don’t know. At this stage of the game, scientists are busy trying to detect it and map out its presence and distribution throughout the Universe. Usually, that involves highly-engineered, sophisticated telescopes.

But a new approach involves a device so small it can sit on a kitchen table.

April 4, 2024April 4, 2024 by Evan Gough

Perseverance Finds its Dream Rock

This Martian rock, named Bunsen Peak, contains minerals that formed in the presence of water. On Earth, these water-deposited carbonate minerals are good at preserving ancient organic material. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If there’s a Holy Grail on Mars, it’s probably a specific type of rock: A rock so important that it holds convincing clues to Mars’ ancient habitability.

Perseverance might have just found it.

April 3, 2024April 3, 2024 by Evan Gough

The Large Magellanic Cloud isn’t Very Metal

This image shows the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds in the sky over the ESO's Paranal Observatory and the four telescopes of the VLT. Image Credit: By ESO/J. Colosimo - http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1511a/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38973313

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the Milky Way’s most massive satellite galaxy. Because it’s so easily observed, astronomers have studied it intently. They’re interested in how star formation in the LMC might have been different than in the Milky Way.

A team of researchers zeroed in on the LMC’s most metal-deficient stars to find out how different.

April 3, 2024April 3, 2024 by Evan Gough

How Animal Movements Help Us Study the Planet

This map shows how elephants moved across Kruger National Park in South Africa over one year. Image Credit: Thaker, M., et al. (2019)

Scientists have been underutilizing a key resource we can use to help us understand Earth: animals. Our fellow Earthlings have a much different, and usually much more direct, relationship with the Earth. They move around the planet in ways and to places we don’t.

What can their movements tell us?

April 2, 2024April 2, 2024 by Evan Gough

Want to Leave the Solar System? Here’s a Route to Take

A future interstellar probe mission aims to travel beyond the heliosphere to the local interstellar medium to understand where our home came from and where it is going. Credit: John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

The edge of the Solar System is defined by the heliosphere and its heliopause. The heliopause marks the region where the interstellar medium stops the outgoing solar wind. But only two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have ever travelled to the heliopause. As a result, scientists are uncertain about the heliopause’s extent and its other properties.

Some scientists are keen to learn more about this region and are developing a mission concept to explore it.